John Harrington-WHAT WE USE - Canon Kit

Here's a video segment on the Canon Kit that we use. A transcription of the video is available after the jump.

Hands on instructional video on photography from Assignment Construct.

Transcript:
Hi, I’m John Harrington and we’re going to break out and break down the wide variety of equipment we use to deliver images to our clients. Next we are going to show you one of the equipment kits we use when we are traveling on assignment. Each kit is different and has a very specific purpose. So lets take a look.

First things first, its obvious that every shoot requires a camera. Back in the day we used to use Hasselblad for a lot of the assignments that we do. But with digital the way it is right now, we haven’t shot a roll of film in three years. This is our Canon kit, we’ll take a look at the Canon kit first and Nikon kit second.

One of the things we like to do is stack lenses together with a stacking cap. By stacking it up, it just allows us to store them easier in the bag and they’re not bouncing around as much. The reason we have an 85mm/1.8 and an 85mm/1.2 is the 85mm/1.8 is the lens we have to use when we’re using the blimp, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. We also have a 70-200mm.

We have three strobes 580-EX, another 580-EX; we have the new 580-EX2. We have a jackrabbit cord so we can plug it into an external battery pack for the flashes. We have an off camera cord so we can take the strobe off axis. And we have a 24-70mm/F2.8. We also obviously carry some business cards in case we need to. This is just an extra pouch if we need to put some extra accessories in. So that’s the Canon kit.
And I want to tell you one thing about the equipment that we’re using here in the ThinkTank. We don’t always need to keep it in the ThinkTank case, instead what we might do is transfer to some of these smaller Domke bags that we have.

So let me show you, which lenses go where, and how we work with the Domkes and the smaller bags. All of our fast glass that would be all of our prime lenses are going to go in one bag. The 135mm F2, our 50mm/1.4, and our 85mm/1.8, and our 35mm/1.4 all go in the bag. We then take the camera and we may mount that camera with another fast glass like the 85mm/1.8.

That’s when we’re working in a really low light situation, a lot of time we’re doing this with concert performances, rock’n’roll, other things where we need to be down at F2 and F1.8.

These other bags are our more travel light standard bags. In that bag is going to go the 17-40mm, the 24-105mm, and over here is going to be the 24-70mm. We’ll drop one of the strobes into this one, a backup strobe into here. We’ll also take an extra battery and drop that in, our extra travel cords, our off camera cord and our jackrabbit. We’ll take the other body and mount one of the lenses on there. And we’re ready to go.

One of the other points I want to make about these flashes is a lot of times we will put a CTO or a green gel in front of that so we can use the strobe and match the strobe to the color temperature of the environment we’re in, whether it’s in a tungsten color temperature or a fluorescent environment.

Using these different gels allows us to match the strobe to the room color temperature. So that’s how we work when we are not using the ThinkTanks airport security equipment, and instead we want to travel light. We’ll take and get rid of this. So this is how we travel light and this is how we shoulder the equipment.

Our strobes and zoom and extra battery go on one shoulder. The other zooms, the other strobe closes up goes on the other shoulder. We don’t always take the fast glass with us. So now that we got the bags on, on go the cameras, one on either side. And we’re ready to go. This, believe it or not, is traveling light.

Below the video is a link to each of the segments, Let me know what you think!

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The Assignment Construct is a commentary about what went into, what went on behind-the-scenes, or otherwise occured before, during, or after an assignment. Everything from images of the setup, to choices of camera angle, client requests (and fulfillment), and so on.